For several months, I got up four days per week to be ready in our designated kitchen by 7:40 am. The few of us early birds would get the kitchen set up based on the lesson itinerary. (Remind me to describe in detail my life as a culinary student.) Class formally starts at 8:30 am. We have a half-hour break at 12:30pm before our second 4-hour lesson. By five in the evening, the kitchen would look like no one had been there all day.

I am inclined towards structure, discipline and routine - particularly the possibility of perfection through repetition, but each attempt an improvement of its precedent for a better outcome. I attribute this to arriving in Singapore a sheltered, ignorant kampung kid (sheltered even by fellow kampung kids' standards). Back in the late 1990s, I was very impressed by how the little garden city was so advanced to every detail. People there took great pride in making everything better as the country - at that time - was striving to be world-class in its infrastructure. It was a culture shock but I learned to appreciate it very quickly. In fact, through the years I became such a person, running things in life asking how it can be done better, faster, and so on.

Hence, with much self-imposed pressure to do well - no excuse for me not to! - I cried myself to sleep the night before the first day in culinary school, knowing my life will be different when I wake up. You see, my life in the recent years has been rather "free-form" - I love it very much but at times I fear creating my own prison instead of playground, and growing unappealingly lazy. In Malaysia I took French and scored 90.5 for the minimum certification for a French passport. Having settled down in New York, I was undecided about doing French despite the French Institute having so much to offer. It is an option but not the only one.

The last time I made mee siam was over a year ago in Kuala Lumpur. Cooking local is the easiest wherever one lives because ingredients are usually in their best conditions in every aspect: availability, form and cost. I can imagine our American friends in Malaysia putting together their Thanksgiving meal - they'd probably gather all their essential ingredients only after numerous trips to different grocery stores. When something means that much to you, all the more you must be determined while maintaining that zen-like calmness so that nothing really gets to you.

I found myself in a similar situation weeks ago when winter officially set in with low single-digit temperature (Celsius) everyday. There are at least three restaurants in Manhattan that serve Malaysian dishes, but every trip leaves me yearning for more as they never quite scratch that itch spot-on. I still drop by one of them now and then for some prawn fritters (aka cucur udang) which I lack the motivation to make at home, and also to say hello to my Indonesian friend who works there. We barely remember each other's names but can always pick up from our previous conversation. That is, me getting there in the first half hour of opening.

A firm belief of mine when it comes to Malaysian home-cooking, particularly true for one-pot meals that contain carbohydrate, protein(s) and greens, is that you either go big or go home. There is no such thing as cooking for just two portions. Anything less than eight portions is not worth the trouble, especially factoring in the fact that ingredients here in America are packed by default in larger quantities. Gone are the days when you go to the market and ask the makcik for fifty cents' worth of taugeh.

On one hand, it seems like just yesterday that we checked the tally sheet as three young fellas efficiently brought up our 200-plus boxes, setting the large furniture pieces in place before anything else. They took a little over six hours to accomplish what would have taken a team of eight men in Malaysia to complete in two days. One could argue that in Malaysia, labour work is far more tedious due to the hot, humid weather. Then again, moving day for us in New York was on a cold December morning, so cold that one is often unaware of cuts caused by tough corrugated hardboard boxes during all that unpacking, flattening and discarding.

briefly

JL and S grew up in France and Malaysia respectively. They met while living in Singapore, stayed a year in the USA (Cambridge, MA) then the south of France, Malaysia, and are back again in the USA (New York, NY).

frenchinos at home is where we share some of our stories with friends, much like the living room, dine-in kitchen, or the timber-deck balcony which we've always wanted to have, which sounds most impossible where we live now.